The History of Court-Packing

NCLA’s Senior Litigation Counsel John Vecchione joins the “Thom Hartmann Program” on SiriusXM Progress 127 to debate the recent proposals to change the number of Supreme Court Justices and the history of court-packing.

Key points:

• For 150 years, we have had nine members of the Supreme Court. That number was established by the Judiciary Act of 1868, which was created to limit the influence of slave states on the Court.

• The court-packing bill has an intimidating effect on the current justices. Even if the bill goes nowhere, it is still an intimidation tactic to make the Supreme Court less rigorous in its legal analysis.

April 20, 2021